Over two weeks in July three major U.S. ruling-class organizations are mounting watershed conventions: the American Federation of Teachers, the Republican National Committee, and the Democratic National Committee. Each represents a ruling-class effort to build a nationalist, racist consensus around the attacks in store for workers and their children in the months and years to come.
The rebels of Ferguson and Baltimore, and now Baton Rouge and St. Paul, have shown the international working class that we have better options than voting and passivity. Militant striking teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico, risking their lives to fight for schools their students deserve, point us to another way. Members of Progressive Labor Party are active in these struggles and more, and our call is clear: Workers of the world, unite and fight for communism!
What can the rulers offer our class? Nothing! Instability and terror grip the Middle East (see editorial, page 2). Russian imperialism squares off against NATO in Europe, with both sides resorting to an aggressive nuclear weapon “deterrence” policy last seen during the Cold War. Chinese imperialism makes the shipping lanes of the South China Sea a flashpoint for potential global conflict.
In the wake of racist police murders in Minnesota, Louisiana, Brooklyn and beyond; in light of the swift death U.S. imperialism brings to workers in the Muslim world and the slow death capitalism means for billions across the globe, PLP makes this call to attendees and opposition forces in Minneapolis, Cleveland and Philadelphia:
NO MORE BUSINESS AS USUAL!
DISRUPT BOSSES’ CONVENTIONS!
DON’T VOTE, REVOLT!
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DNC: Dump Clinton
Hillary and Bill Clinton and their allies have fronted for the capitalist bosses’ war on the international working class for two decades. Hillary was her husband’s working partner during his viciously anti-worker administration of the 1990s. (As she once famously said, “We are the president.”) She was an especially vocal advocate for the sexist, racist welfare reform that threw millions of people—disproportionately Black mothers and children—into extreme poverty.
Hillary Clinton also backed the 1994 crime bill, including the “three strikes” rule, that paved the way for mass racist incarceration and expanded the prison industrial complex for privatized slave labor. She dehumanized Black youth in gangs as “super-predators” with “no conscience, no empathy…we have to bring them to heel.” The 100,000 additional cops who flooded U.S. city streets, another provision of the Clinton crime bill, were trained as an occupying army. The recent wave of racist murders by police—lynchings by any other name—are the fruit of that legislation.
Through sanctions and indiscriminate bombings of Iraq, the Clintons slaughtered 500,000 Iraqi children. As U.S. senator, Hillary Clinton enthusiastically backed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to shore up US control over Middle Eastern oil, killing hundreds of thousands more civilians in the process. As Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, she took a lead role in engineering attacks on civilians in Libya and the coup in Honduras that helped make it the murder capital of the world. Now she is leading the charge for a more aggressive U.S. intervention in Syria, a conflict that has already killed hundreds of thousands and left millions on the run.
While Clinton is finance capital’s favored candidate, her bottomless greed and arrogant recklessness are making the bosses nervous. The State Department email scandal—and an ensuing front-page reprimand in the New York Times, the premier capitalist mouthpiece—manifests a grave problem for the ruling class. Clinton inspires so little trust that she may be unable to garner mass support for the wider war U.S. rulers are counting on to save their shaky empire.
Now that Bernie Sanders has capped his “political revolution” by endorsing an arch-imperialist and Wall Street insider, his role as a cynical misleader of honest workers and youth may be nearing an end. In the ultimate exercise of “lesser evil” politics, he’s now asking his followers to trust the liberal bosses to defeat Donald Trump’s gutter racism.
But voting will never smash racism. Nothing short of a communist revolution can accomplish that essential task.
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AFT: Teachers, Take the Streets!
In this brutally unequal system, teachers are expected to play a stabilizing role. They are directed to prepare future workers, soldiers and inmates for the U.S. ruling class to use and discard in their drive for maximum profit and imperialist dominion.
When Hillary Clinton visits Minneapolis for the AFT Convention, don’t stand and cheer for an imperialist butcher! Don’t applaud an architect of mass racist incarceration! Teachers must stand with Diamond Reynolds, whose fiancé, Philando Castile, was executed before her eyes—and with her four-year-old daughter in the car’s back seat. We must WALK OUT when Hillary takes the stage and join local protests against racism.
Beginning in 2002, Philando was a cafeteria worker in the St. Paul public schools. He was a strong and positive force in his school community, knowing all 530 students at J.J. Hill Montessori School by name and their particular dietary needs (Vox, 7/8). This is the workingman taken from us. There can be NO BUSINESS AS USUAL in the face of racist police murder.
Meanwhile, the AFT leadership has been complicit in a decades-long pattern of deepening segregation. In 2010, union president Randi Weingarten embraced Bill Gates, the apostle of a charter school movement that has intensified this segregation. Recently, the AFT has signed on to data-driven education reforms that ramp up stress and stigma for students, parents and teachers alike.
While union hacks have devised increasingly elaborate stratagems to sell out students and teachers to reformist billionaires, education workers in PLP have taken up the task of organizing parents, students and teachers to turn racist attacks on our schools into their opposite. An injury to one is an injury to all! We are building the multiracial unity we will need to unite the working class and overthrow capitalism—the source of our exploitation—once and for all. We seek to sustain the communist traditions pioneered by Cuban masses who, in 1961, suspended high school and fanned out to the countryside to defeat illiteracy. Or the Chinese youth who, in 1966, launched a Cultural Revolution (later betrayed by Mao) to push their society forward to communism. Or the Bolsheviks who smashed sexist prohibitions against women’s access to basic and higher education after the Russian Revolution of 1917.
More of the same isn’t working; we need communism! AFT delegates: Keep an eye out for CHALLENGE supplements, and check www.plp.org. We need your help in distributing our literature among your colleagues back home.
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RNC: It’s Capitalism’s Fault
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, is blatantly racist and sexist. He is the favored candidate of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi sympathizers the world over, from Louisiana’s David Duke to France’s Marine Le Pen.
Disaffected workers misled by Trump are being pitted against Black, Latin, Muslim and immigrant workers. These divisions are pervasive in the U.S., from education to housing to employment. (See antiracistbattle at Trump fundraiser on page 3).
Trump’s gutter politics flow naturally from a long history of racist policies and pronouncements by both Republicans and Democrats. They date back to the Declaration of Independence—a document, as a scholar of American history recently noted in the New York Times, that voiced the Founding Fathers’ fears of rebellious Black slaves and “merciless Indian savages.” Voting against Trump does nothing to challenge or disrupt that history.
The finance capital bosses whom both Trump and Hillary Clinton represent—ExxonMobil, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase—use their media to keep workers invested in a bought-and-paid-for political process. If anything, Trump has helped the main wing of the
ruling class by marginalizing the Tea Party movement and more domestic-oriented
capitalists like the Koch Brothers.
Taking heed of Trump’s volatility, which could be bad for business, the bosses’ newspapers, websites and talking heads are doing all they can to lead anti-racist workers into the arms of Hillary Clinton. But a vote for either of these candidates stands in absolute contradiction to workers’ class interests.
Fortunately, we have a better choice than dead-end electoral politics: mass anti-racist class struggle and the Progressive Labor Party.
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The surprising success of Trump and Sanders reflects workers’ outrage at perpetual mass unemployment and the grotesque inequalities of U.S. capitalism. Meanwhile, AFT members are left to pick up the pieces of a devastated society in segregated, overcrowded, underfunded urban schools. Capitalism is a proven failure, and all workers—and their innocent children—pay the price.
The DNC and RNC are both controlled by the main wing of the U.S. ruling class. Their conventions are rigged to select presidential candidates who will be willing and able to lead the U.S. into global inter-imperialist war. Teachers are expected to push nationalist ideology while staffing an educational apparatus that sorts children into a small group with a future and a larger group without one. If teachers fail to fight back against the racist, anti-child, anti-worker agenda of the Weingarten leadership, conditions can only get worse.
Our opportunity to break with these misleaders is ever present. We must seize the time! Our class needs communism, a classless society. Our class needs leaders like the teacher-rebels in Oaxaca, not the warmongers, racists and illusion-peddlers who will top the Democratic and Republican party tickets this fall.
Join PLP to unite with a movement that will liberate the working class once and for all from capitalist exploitation and war.
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No Trump, No Clinton, The Whole Damn System’s Gotta Go
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- 15 July 2016 314 hits
TEXAS, June 17—Communists led hundreds of workers at an anti-Trump protest outside a country club fundraiser to form a picket line and confront the cops, homeland security, and their liberal racist collaborators.
PLP took aim to expose both Trump and the Democratic Party as the anti-working class tools of the ruling class that they are. Both had scheduled major events here in the same week, and we kicked off our summer project to take them on.
For Trump’s fundraiser, we wrote a leaflet and members of our base translated it. It called on workers to “Defend Our Immigrant Brothers and Sisters” and to fight back against the racist terror of both Trump and Clinton. It connected the role of inter-imperialist rivalries with the bosses’ escalation of racism. We attacked Trump’s overt anti-immigrant racism and Clinton’s record of genocidal war in the Middle East.
At the protest, police cordoned off an area with barricades for the anti-Trump rally. About 500 protesters lined the barricade waiting for Trump to arrive. As the crowd stood waiting, our group of PL’ers and friends turned the event into a march. We organized a picket line and began marching back and forth behind the barricade. While the liberal misleaders chanted “Dump Trump!” we influenced the entire rally with our chants of “No Borders, No Nations, No Racist Deportations!” and “Hillary, Trump All the Same, Racist Terror is the Name of Their Game!” As we marched we got out hundreds more leaflets.
Racists, Go Home!
Minutes after Trump’s motorcade arrived, a group of Trump supporters crossed the street and taunted the protesters. At the front of the area where the confrontation started, our group began leading a chant of “Racists Go Home, Racists Go Home!” Dozens of protesters rallied behind us as we pressed forward to confront the racists. We were ready for a fight and so were scores of protesters behind us.
Revealing their true face, the liberal “peacekeepers,” who had been trained by the liberal misleaders to act as police-collaborators to prevent protester fightback, rushed in to form a barrier between Trump’s racist supporters and us. The “peacekeepers” formed a barrier in order to protect the Trump supporters from us, yelling for us to “move back!”
City police and Homeland Security cops stood behind the “peacekeepers” as they watched the liberals do their job for them.
Eventually the racists backed off. The “peacekeepers” kept yelling for us to “move back!” but we continued to chant with the masses who had surrounded us: “Deportations mean, we got to fight back! Racism means, we got to fight back!” The entire confrontation only lasted a few minutes but it showed us a glimpse of what is possible with PL’s leadership.
Organizing is Key
Our strength in leading the fightback stemmed from our organizing effort leading up to the event. We leafleted around town for days, calling on workers to join us in confronting Trump. We talked to nurses, doctors and construction workers in the medical center area where Trump was scheduled to speak. Some took stacks of leaflets to hand out to co-workers inside the hospitals.
We got out hundreds more leaflets in parts of the city with concentrations of immigrant and Black workers. Our message of multiracial unity with immigrants under attack by racist politicians was well received and many workers pledged to attend the protest.
Trump, Clinton, Two Faces of The Same Coin
The day following the Trump event, the Democratic Party was wrapping up it’s state convention downtown. We and canvassed the area and convention hall, handing out hundreds, and had lots of good conversation with workers. Though the majority were Clinton supporters, many gladly took the leaflet, acknowledging that they support her because they feel she is the lesser evil compared to Trump (see more about Clinton on page 8).
Many may still vote for the Democrats in the upcoming election, but we came away with a sense of greater possibility. Despite the bosses’ efforts in this election, their hold on the ideas of the working class is limited. Many workers support either candidate because they have been told the only way to fix society’s problems is by voting. But many have lost some faith in the ability of capitalist democracy to solve their problems. This is an opportunity for PLP to show the limits of what the rulers will offer and that only communism offers workers a world run for us and by us.
As we move forward this summer, we will hold schools on communist philosophy and history, at which we plan to bring our friends and contacts we’ve made throughout the summer project. Join us and stay tuned for more fightback!
MEXICO, June 13—Hundreds of teachers and other workers carried on the fight as they beat back the fascist attacks of the Mexican ruling class’s armed thugs in Oaxaca. United, workers blocked road access, burned down a police station and hotels used by snipers. The many years of the country’s militarization along with the rulers’ organized political crimes are used to oppress the working class by all three parts of the government. At the same time the electoral parties show a total submissiveness and collaboration with the police state we face. The mass movement led by the CNTE (the national teachers union) is one of the few with the strength needed to face the bosses’ attacks. It is no coincidence that the capitalist class is trying to annihilate this movement so they can advance their multimillion projects.
The police started the criminal attack against hundreds of teachers who defended themselves with sticks and rocks, putting up barricades, and blocking the road from Nochixtlan to the city of Oaxaca. Police shot at the crowds, killing more than 10 and injuring more than 50. The bosses’ henchmen thought it would be easy, but as soon as nearby workers realized what was happening, they joined the teachers to repel this criminal attack. “The longer they were there, [the] more people came to confront them, the police retreated, some of them beaten by the people,” a journalist said.
The population jumped on them and the hordes of murderous cowards retreated. Everywhere, on the way to Oaxaca, they met with workers’ resistance. That first night, the troops occupied the first square of the city of Oaxaca, but the following morning thousands of teachers and neighbors were out on the streets forcing them to retreat. The ruler’s strategy of exhaustion, discrediting the teachers in the media, and police repression did not scare the CNTE. The CNTE is stronger amongst all the teachers’ throughout Mexico. They are tired of the impunity, the corruption, the government and their genocidal politics.
The popular movement led by the CNTE is reformist—it defends labor and popular rights. While at this moment it is playing a crucial part confronting the police state, reforms of capitalism don’t work for workers. The capitalist system will never meet the basic necessities of the working class, like education, health and housing—but will reduce salaries and labor rights. The capitalists’ government’s rejection of the demands from this popular movement shows once again that capitalism has no interest in solving workers’ problems. The CNTE has a few anti-capitalist positions but it does not organize to destroy the root cause of our misery and suffering: the whole system. This is the job of communists in PLP.
The education reform the teachers are fighting against is racist privatizing of the education system and leads to the firing of thousands of teachers. It also leads to even more oppression of teachers and indigenous communities. The economic background of these reforms is that the ruling class and their imperialist partners need to destroy popular opposition in order to take large extensions of communal land in the south and center of the country. The development of projects and infrastructure will affect thousands of the indigenous population. It might be thought that the expansion of the Lázaro Cárdenas and Chiapas ports and the creation of the oil industrial corridor Coatzacoalcos-Tabasco-Campeche could bring wellbeing and improve the conditions in the region, but because of the capitalist nature of maximizing profits to compete in the imperialist market, we know that these projects will only bring evictions and dispossessions of thousands of farmers and miserable salaries.
Right now, the seven-week strike and mobilizations by the teachers and population in the states of Chiapas, Guerrero, Michoacán, and Oaxaca, has the rulers on the defensive. What they really want is to protect companies like PEMEX, Walmart, ADO, Moctezuma and others, which have been affected by the strikers’ road blockades. Osorio Chong, Government Secretary responsible for the repression in Nochixtlan, is preparing another attack in the next few hours, or days.
PLP has taken an active part in this movement, discussing and spreading the communist analysis through flyers and CHALLENGE. This mass movement gives us the opportunity to make significant advances, to develop our organizing for the communist revolution. We can win many people tired of the hellhole of capitalism. Let us take the challenge—let’s win more young workers, teachers, farmworkers, and students to the fight for a communist revolution.
PAKISTAN, July 8—From the steel mills to the hospitals and farms, the Progressive Labor Party is fighting shoulder to shoulder with workers and striving to win them closer to communism.
The Pakistani ruling class is
assaulting workers on every front. They are raising the prices of basic necessities of life and imposing heavy taxes on poor workers as they give tax breaks to capitalists. They are increasing unemployment by privatizing the big industries as they use terrorism to keep us passive against all these anti-working class attacks.
PLP is gaining strength by exposing the rulers’ and misleaders’ lies. We are involved in many struggles while the misleadership of the puppet trade unions continually sells out the workers. The anti-privatization protests at
Pakistan International Airlines and the Pakistan Steel Mill were strong: thousands of workers took the streets and morale was high. The union misleaders promised we would succeed if workers sacrifice their time and resources. Some workers fell for these lies. Then as usual, the union collaborated with the bosses and sold out our class.
Yet the working class advanced as PLP struggled with workers to see that only communist revolution can bring systemic change in their lives.
All Sectors of Working Class in Battle
While the bosses try to crush pro-communist ideas, we are struggling to bring the workers closer to communist ideas under the red banner of PLP. We are fighting back in the teachers’ movement against privatization and within the landless farmers’ movement against landowning bosses. Healthcare workers, including young doctors, nurses, and women’s health specialists, held a work stoppage in demand for higher wages and service structure. Domestic workers are protesting against cops at their work places and for better pay and working conditions. Power loom workers and railway workers are organizing struggles against the bosses instead of
following their union’s puppet leadership.
PLP keeps these struggles alive, while being clear that only a communist revolution can foster a world run by the working class to provide the working and living conditions that workers deserve. Society will be run by and for the international working class.
Terror and Diversions
Bosses have divided the world into many so-called nationalities and religious sects. Different bosses’ political parties and sections of the ruling class are at each other’s throats. They try to divert working-class anger to serve their own profit interests and capitalist
political parties, convincing workers to fight along national and religious lines.
While the bosses are always in competition with one another, they are all united in exploiting and attacking the working class.
The working class in Pakistan is passing through an awful phase of history. On the one hand, the bosses’ parties are misleading them. On the other hand, boss-protected terrorists are killing them. Unemployment is rising and workers are also being used by nationalist, fundamentalist, sexist and racist groups to kill each other in the name of nation, religion and race.
Women workers are subject to vicious sexism. They are threatened and harassed at the work places and streets. The so called “Sharia Council” of the parliamentarians is creating more problems for them by introducing new theological laws that say women can be beaten and tortured if they ignore the orders of male family members. The leadership of women workers in the health and domestic industry, in the homes and streets, countering these sexist attacks.
Taking Leadership
Party members and workers worldwide should follow the example of the working class and comrades in Pakistan. Fight the bosses everywhere; in every factory, school or community. Fight racism, sexism and all divisions as we organize for higher wages or against police killings. But in every battle raise the red flag of communist revolution. There really is no other road for the workers of the world. Join the international Progressive Labor Party and fight for communism!
NEW YORK CITY, July 7 —PLP and over 100 other demonstrators marched through soaring heat and hilly terrain, right to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s door to protest his support of Israel, a racist and fascist apartheid state. The whole town saw the march, and several Latin workers we met at the train station even joined the march. PLP members made sure there were chants in Spanish. This march was an important step in smashing borders and bringing all workers together: white, Black, Latin, Muslim, Jewish, men, and women.
Israel: Fertile Ground for Racism
With U.S. backing, Israel has colonized the West Bank and Gaza for 49 years. Palestinians are restricted from travel and suffer scarcities of food, water, and health care. Israelis abuse and humiliate Palestinians on a daily basis. Soldiers and settlers can kill Palestinians with impunity, and every few years the Israeli army rains mass slaughter on Gaza, the last time in 2014. Palestinians in Gaza can’t even flee bombings because they are completely fenced in.
Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as Israeli Jews from Ethiopia, the Middle East, and North Africa, are also subject to intense racism and brutality.
There were two large rebellions, known as Intifadas, against Israeli rule in 1988 and 2002, which both failed
under corrupt misleadership. As a result of these rebellions, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), instead of the Israeli Army, gets to arrest, harass, and kill Palestinians in some parts of
Palestine. Today, there is no leadership for resistance. The main two parties,
Fatah and Hamas, although different, are both corrupt and in it for their own enrichment. These parties can never
liberate workers in Palestine. They fight for a separate, capitalist Palestinian state. Drawing borders will only divide workers and change which capitalist is in control. It will not end oppression and exploitation. Only worldwide communist revolution led by Progressive Labor Party gives a chance for workers to be free.
BDS: Big Fake Solution
About ten years ago a group of activists in the West Bank launched the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement against the Israeli state. This movement aims to force businesses and institutions to stop investing in Israel via sanctions and boycotts. It has become an effective international tool for educating people about the horrific situation within Israel and Palestine and the bad
publicity has gotten under the skin of Zionists everywhere. In the U.S., students who promote BDS have been threatened and intimidated on their campuses.
Several states are considering legislation against BDS, and in NY Governor Cuomo took matters into his own hands. He single-handedly issued a proclamation that all BDS supporters would be banned from doing business with NY State and be listed on the internet.
But let’s be clear: the BDS movement cannot end oppression in Israel, or elsewhere. It is nationalist, focusing on the plight of Palestinians without regard to class. Workers in Palestine have more in common with workers in Israel than with the ruling class of Palestine. Palestine is a capitalist and highly unequal society. The Palestinian bosses cooperates with Israeli and international capitalists to exploit other Palestinian workers. There must be a struggle for a communist world, not just an end to occupation.
Many BDS supporters think a boycott alone can win politicians and achieve a free Palestine. They look to South Africa for inspiration. Fighters forget that years of armed struggle were most important there. More serious yet, the leadership in South Africa settled for an end to apartheid without ending capitalism. This guaranteed that the vast majority of Black workers remained in poverty while some white politicians and businessmen were replaced with Black ones.
Israel, U.S. Tied to Imperialism
So why did Governor Cuomo take action against BDS if it is not a real threat to Israel? Cuomo has interests in higher office and needs to show that he is
pro-Israel. Every president since Israel’s creation has supported Israel, including the present candidates for the office, Trump, and Clinton. Israel serves as a strategic military watchdog for the U.S. in the Middle East, and the U.S. gives Israel $3 billion in aid every year in exchange for protection of oil profits.
Although BDS is not the solution to oppression and brutality in Israel, many militant anti-Zionists, Jewish and Arab, are active in BDS. We must win them to see that only a mass PLP can defeat U.S. imperialism and its worldwide terror.
Comrades in several cities are involved in organizations that promote BDS and we are struggling with workers to see the power of communism. We shall continue to bring our revolutionary perspective to our fellow activists,
promoting the international fight against capitalism.
